I Believe in Sherlock Holmes
by Poke-it-with-a-Stick
Summary: London's being invaded by a force John can't understand and Mycroft can't quantify. Belief.
1. John Watson

***sniff***

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><p>The first time John sees the graffiti, it's a week after the funeral and he's not quite sure he hasn't gone insane. After all, he only glimpses it as the taxi rushes past, and he's sure there are plenty of other words that could look like 'I believe in Sherlock Holmes' at high speed.<p>

Two days later, he catches sight of another one. 'Moriarty was real', it says, and he stops, stares, runs his fingers over chipped concrete and wonders if madness usually expresses itself through thin smears of paint under a bridge somewhere in Hammersmith.

Three days after that, he has to admit that it isn't just him. There's graffiti on the Underground, scratched into the side of the Houses of Parliament (and what will Mycroft make of that?), in the back rooms of pubs and in bathroom stalls. The capital is occupied by a silent army with only one message: we believe in Sherlock Holmes.

John's heart aches to see it, because he is barely adjusting to a world without Sherlock, a world in which the brilliant, beautiful man he knew was a delusional liar. It took everything he had to convince himself that not even Sherlock could come back from the dead. He doesn't know what it would do to him if he turned out to be wrong. He doesn't dare to hope.

It takes six weeks of soul-searching before John allows himself to act. As statements go, it's negligible, almost cowardly: a few Sharpie-d words in a hospital toilet. But it's enough. It connects him with thousands of others across London – across the world, in fact; reports are beginning to come in about strange graffiti in Melbourne, in Vienna, in Singapore. And it affirms a truth he never dared to utter.

He believes in Sherlock Holmes.


	2. Mycroft Holmes

Deep within Whitehall, in an office whose plushness and shininess are just the correct side of tasteful, Mycroft tuts.

"I am aware," he says, to an assistant who understands when to speak (only when spoken to) and when to be silent (the rest the time), "that the public are distressed about the death of my brother, but why they feel it necessary to express it through the vandalism of public property I cannot imagine."

"No, sir," says the assistant, who has not survived this long in this job by answering questions that are not meant to be answered.

"Ah well," says Mycroft. "Continue with punitive measures as appropriate, Johnson, and bring me those files."

"Yes, sir," says Johnson, and brings the files, and goes back to issuing court orders to the heartbroken souls who scrawl 'I believe in Sherlock Holmes' in underpasses, and tries not to sympathise with them.

In the next room, the man whose job is to run half the world (and who runs the other half in his spare time) leafs through reports from Melbourne, Vienna and Singapore. He has spies in the upper echelons of every government in the world. He has spies spying on his spies. It is his job to know everything, and he does it well. If he cannot find one sniff of evidence that Sherlock Holmes is still alive, therefore, it is logical to assume that he is dead. His little brother may be good, but he is surely not better than him.

There is absolutely no reason to sketch a few alterations on the plans for the Olympic stadium, so that, if anyone bothered to look – which they won't, of course, they never do – the pattern of coloured seats would spell out a few simple words.

I believe in Sherlock Holmes.


	3. Greg Lestrade

**Apologies for the über-massive hiatus between this and the last part. You know how it is - you plan four chapters of a story, write two, lose inspiration, accidentally go to Belgium... or possibly that last part only happens to me. Anyway, these final two chapters unfortunately probably won't be up to the standard of the first two, beause as aforementioned, I ran out of steam a bit. Let's just pretend the workaday tone of this chapter is due to Lestrade's internal monologue being less poetic than John and Mycroft's, shall we? And while you're at it, you can pretend that I didn't make the police department look completely hopeless without Sherlock (although to be fair, Conan Doyle himself often implied the same thing). **

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><p>Three days after Sherlock's death, the force comes up against a case it can't solve. Three bloody days. Greg had hoped they'd at least make it a week. It's a classic locked-room mystery, as stereotypical as they come and all the more bewildering for it: a corpse with a gunshot wound to the head. Suicide's the obvious explanation, except for one glaring anomaly. There's no weapon.<p>

Whoever said that it's better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all clearly never met Sherlock. If by 'love' you mean 'rely on to an unhealthy degree in order to get your job done'. Greg's slightly drunk and he's not sure whether that makes sense. But that's what happens when crime rates are about to skyrocket and you know you'll have to explain to your boss that every other case you've cracked for the past two years has thanks to a high-functioning sociopath with cheekbones that could be used as offensive weapons and a brain that definitely has been.

Greg rests his forehead on the table and tries to convince himself that yes, Sherlock really is dead, and he's not magically going to reappear just because the force is fucked without him. Because no matter how much Greg needs him, no matter how much he rants and rails and despairs and genuinely fears he may go mad from the pressure of the capital's impending crimewave, Sherlock Holmes was only ever a fraud. And he wasn't - isn't - immortal.

But although Greg can repress the worm of hope twisting his gut, he can't quite shake the tiny, tentative voice at the back of his mind, the one he only hears after a long day of too much failure and too little sleep.

The voice that says, _I believe in Sherlock Holmes_.


	4. Molly Hooper

**This is the last chapter of this series. I'm sorry it's taken so long to produce, but I find Molly Hooper a very problematic character to write about, as she's basically a convenient plot device who then gets treated absolutely appallingly by Sherlock (even worse than most women in the show; I won't go into all my 'Moffat, y u no feminism?' issues here, but believe me, there are many). This chapter went through three different drafts and yet I still really, really don't know how to write the relationship between Molly and Sherlock in a way that is not on some level emotionally abusive. Here, I've tried to make it so that Sherlock isn't actually any more of a dick to her than he is to anyone else, relatively speaking, but it's come out as an awkward cross between fix-it fic for Molly's emotions and Molly just flat-out lying to herself. So, uh, hooray, here's a story with multiple possible interpretations? Either way, I'm very sorry. **

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><p>Molly Hooper is okay with death. It's an odd thing to admit - not first-date material, certainly - but true nonetheless. She works in a morgue, and you can only see so many permutations of smashed skullaneurysm/overdose before you come to the conclusion that one dead body is much like another. The cause may be different, but the end result is always the same: rigor mortis, autolysis, putrefaction.

So when Sherlock Holmes sweeps into Barts with his coat and his cheekbones and his devastating lack of social skills, it doesn't take her too long to adjust. It's remarkable how quickly she gets used to bringing out bodies on the sly so Sherlock can test his bizarre theories, to 'it's a matter of life or death!' just meaning a shorter lunch break and to knowing more about the Official Secrets Act than she does about the X Factor. The cases that Sherlock gets involved in are often violent, and the things that happen to the victims horrible; but Molly reminds herself that whatever the means or motive, the result is still just death. And she can deal with that.

She thinks that's partly why Sherlock chose her as his pet pathologist. Along with her hopeless crush, of course. Oh yes, Sherlock knows her weaknesses, and he plays her the same way he plays his violin: sharp and discordant, yet always, always producing the notes he wants. But that's the thing. He's utterly transparent about his motives; never bothers to disguise the fact that he's manipulating her. And that, strange to say, is what endears him to her.

Molly Hooper is small and quiet, and she likes cats and the colour pink. This means that people - parents, boyfriends, colleagues - make assumptions about her. They think she's as soft as her scatter cushions; weak and naive and easily deceived. They don't notice her degrees, or the judo qualifications on her wall, or even - for Christ's sake - the fact that she works in a morgue. Sherlock, on the other hand, looks straight at her and sees everything. Lonely. Emotional. Easily flustered by petty, everyday things. But intelligent, more so than people give her credit for. Discreet. Useful.

Sherlock is brutal, yes, but never more so to her than to other people. He uses her, yes, but out of far purer motives than everyone else. Sherlock is the first man she's ever met who doesn't want sex, or money, or power, or status from her. He just wants the truth. That's why she's believed in him, right from the start.

And now that belief is finally being repaid. There's a reason why, when he needs to disappear, Sherlock Holmes goes to quiet, besotted Molly Hooper for help. He knows it, and she knows it. And she considers the knowledge some kind of recompense for seeing the hurt in John's eyes at the funeral and not being able to ease it.

Other people believe in Sherlock Holmes. Sherlock Holmes believes in her.


End file.
